You Might Be Surprised (At What You Have)

(for section re first finding out what you already have)

Not only at how many native species (plant and animal) you already have on your property, or at how many more you might attract (of course, without importing them), but even more at how many are present in the seedbank, just waiting for a little disturbance to come along and spark them into life. 

As an example, in 1999 my mom and stepdad bought a new place on a ridgetop a few miles near our old place. Their acre was formerly used as a Xmas tree farm, but now was becoming overgrown with nasty weeds like poison hemlock, thistles, tarweed (?), plus rank native “brush” like PO and blackberries as well as oak seedlings, all tangled among big piles of trash. Amazingly enough, there were some remnant little patches of native grass and sedges along the edge, where a road had kept the land more open. But there was no indication that there had even been much of anything but the low-diversity dense brushy tangle that covers the adjacent slope. 

Anyway, they had a friend come in with his tractor and basically scrape the field clean and burn the big piles of wood and trash, leaving an essentially “clean slate” except for a few oak and madrone seedlings. 

Then came an unseasonable rain in mid May, which immediately germinated a new ground cover of seedlings. Although most of the seedlings were of weeds (thistles and nightshades and pimpernel etc), and even though the timing of the rain was wrong for most native (and even many Mediterranean weeds), a remarkable assortment of native plants popped up, including some I had not previously seen anywhere on the property. Among these latter and taking only the legumes were: 3+ species of Lotus (L. scoparius and micranthus and purshianus), sky lupine, and, most interesting to me, no less than 6 native species of clovers (T. albopurpureum, T. gracilentum, T. bifidum var. decipiens, T. ciliolatum, T. microdon, and T. microcephalum). 

Even though most of these natives were represented by only one or a few individual plants, each of those plants produced hundreds of seeds; in other words, the field was well on its way “back” to a relatively high-diversity, vibrant, interesting state that I would never have guessed it ever passed through. 

Other natives that appeared after that freak May rain were: Camissonia sp., Navarretia, Gnaphalium stramineum. 

And later, when the real rains came, more natives cropped up. 

It was no hard job to selectively hoe all the plants I didn’t want sparing only the crème de la crème. Among these were a few that, although not “native” here, are 1) no threat to native vegetation and 2) either very attractive aesthetically or very attractive food-producers for birds. 

To my joy, these included a few each of my 2 favorite bird-seed plants: Echinochloa crus-galli and Amaranthus retroflexus. And one of the less-appealing but still productive (in fact a species cultivated for human food in S. America), i.e. Madia sativa. 

More re sparking off seedbank, with caveat that the longer the “dead” period the fewer seeds/species still viable, so expect your results to be in proportion to the time elapsed since…